If you’re a student who wants to crack the toughest exams out there, you would’ve marveled the effortless ease with which the brightest consistently finish in top 0.1 percentile.

If you’re a wannabe tennis player, you would be in awe of the games of Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic.

“Their brain, their body is wired differently.”

“They’ve natural talent.”

“They’ve innate ability.”

“They’re blessed.”

These thoughts cross your mind, and you convince yourself to live a ‘normal’ life because you can’t change your wiring, because you can’t create talent out of nowhere, and because blessings are divine.

What if I tell you that these things matter much, much less – if at all they do – than you think? (As we’ll learn later in the post, wiring, for example, depends only on our experiences.) What if I tell you that there is a path accessible to everyone that can take you too to the dizzying levels of some of these greats?

Do you envy your classmates who study in a group? After all, it’s not easy to get illustrious classmates to rub brains with and get the benefit of knowledge of others.

If you do… then, well, you don’t need to. Because you, as a lone soul furrowing through your books and notes, are likely studying more efficiently than your classmates studying in a group.

In this post, I’ll enumerate reasons for and against group-study, and talk why self-study is better. Although there are several arguments in favor of and against each, two very fundamentals of efficient study – how you learn something and how you focus – go in favor of self-study, which kind of outweigh other factors.

That, however, doesn’t mean group-study shouldn’t get a place in your schedule. It should. As you’ll figure out in the latter part of the post, it trumps (no political connotations!) self-study under one condition.